Experimenting With Popular Media: Using Short-Form Videos on Social Media to Market Reference Services

A new academic year offers an opportunity to try something new for students, faculty, and librarians alike. One of the new things going on around W&J and our library is a new strategy for marketing our reference services using short-form videos on social media. Short-form videos are videos created for social media that are typically no more than 60 seconds long (Oladipo, 2023). Since we are currently only using Meta platforms (Facebook and Instagram), our limit is 90 seconds. Short-form video has become the dominant form of social media content on a number of platforms since the explosion of TikTok’s popularity in 2020. So why is it noteworthy that we are catching up with the times and following in the footsteps of other very creative and successful library and cultural heritage social media accounts?

Our goal for this new strategy is to boost our reference engagement. We discuss how students can get help from a librarian and what a librarian can help students with during our instruction sessions and other events such as our orientation welcome sessions. However, our reference usage statistics remain below pre-pandemic levels. Our hope is that by meeting students where they are in the format they have come to prefer, in addition to our other efforts, they will internalize the information and start reaching out to the library for help in greater numbers. Cheng, Lam, and Chiu (2020) found in their survey of community impressions about the University of Hong Kong Libraries’ Facebook page that students viewed social media content as more helpful than other community members (pp.4-5). Even though the social media environment in Hong Kong is different from that in the United States, Cheng, Lam, and Chiu’s findings are encouraging that there is potential to increase student engagement with library services through social media marketing.

Alvis, Porter, and Ayling (2023) discussed in their RBMS conference panel, “Video Thrilled the Biblio Star: Communicating Rare Books on Video,” how to engage audiences through video content on social media and stressed the role of a central figure to hold viewer’s engagement. To ensure consistency in the central figure regardless of who creates the video for our video series, we are going to use a stuffed cat as our central figure. In addition to bringing a little childhood whimsy to the videos, we are hoping that the cat will help emphasize the simplicity of using library services. We are currently planning to have videos about how to use the Library’s chat reference, make an appointment with a librarian, and generally how librarians can help with research.

Have any of you tried similar strategies for marketing your reference services? What was the experience like? Please share in the comments!

References

Alvis, A., Porter, D., Ayling, T. (2023, June 30). Video Thrilled the Biblio Star: Communicating Rare Books on Video [Paper Panel]. RBMS: A new kind of professional, Indiana University – Bloomington/Hybrid, Bloomington, IN, United States.

Cheng, W.W.H., Lam, E.T.H., Chiu, D.K.W. (2020). Social media as a platform in academic library marketing: A comparative study. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 48(5), 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2020.102188.

Oladipo, T. (2023, May 30). Ask Buffer: What is Short-Form Video, and How Can You Use It?. Buffer. https://buffer.com/resources/short-form-video/.